Bob Colacello: 24-hour party person

Rock stars, movie gods, political giants… As diary writer on Andy Warhol’s ‘Interview’ magazine in 1970s New York, Bob Colacello partied with them all. Yet the pictures he took have the intimacy of family snaps. He talks to Horatia Harrod

It was 1973, on the roof of the St Regis Hotel, in midtown Manhattan. That was when Bob Colacello really arrived. He was only 26, and already editor of Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. He'd gone with Warhol to plenty of parties before, but this was the biggest yet – Mick Jagger's 30th birthday party, thrown by Ahmet Ertegun, co-founder of Atlantic Records, and his wife Mica. On the way over, Warhol and Colacello had picked up a couple of other guests – Truman Capote and Lee Radziwill, Jackie O's little sister. A year later, Warhol asked Colacello to write a social diary for Interview. It became the 'Out' column and by 1976 Colacello was illustrating it with his own photos, taken with a cute, inconspicuous Minox 35EL.

For six years he took in the scene. It was, he tells me on the phone from his New York apartment, 'a special moment in social history, especially in New York. You had this post-war generation which was the first in America to be universally well-educated, almost universally affluent, and kind of spoiled; you also had the pill, and penicillin basically eradicating most sexually transmitted diseases. There was this 10-year period where everybody felt they could do anything.'

The story of how the Brooklyn-born Colacello was drawn into the highest reaches of New York society is an illustration of just how possible anything was. He was living at home with his parents in Rockville Centre, Long Island while he studied film at Columbia; one evening at dinner with his parents he got a phone call. On the end of the line was Paul Morrissey, a movie director at Andy Warhol's Factory. He and Warhol had just read Colacello's glowing review of their latest film, Trash, in the Village Voice; would he like to come round to meet them?

At this point – 1970 – Warhol was as big a star as Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin. Colacello excitedly told his parents what had happened. 'My father went white and said, ''If you go and work for that creep on Union Square, I will not only break your movie camera, I'll break your legs!" Colacello was a good middle-class boy, and he loved his father. But, naturally, he made his way to the Factory at the first available opportunity. 'I went up to the sixth floor and got off the elevator and there was this little foyer with a steel bulletproof door with a little glass window. I looked through and there was Andy Warhol sitting at an Art Deco desk eating lunch.' Warhol took to him instantly, and Colacello's timing was just right because, after being shot in the stomach, Warhol was waving goodbye to the Factory's superstars, speed freaks and street people. The artist felt frightened and had decided to professionalise the Factory with the help of fresh-faced boys and girls straight out of college: 'The old guard of Sixties superstars would sit and glare at us – like, who are these suburban kids that Andy's gone and hired?'

Colacello ended up at parties thrown by the grandest hostesses in New York – Nan Kempner, Lily Auchincloss, Isabelle Eberstadt; hung out with movie stars and rock stars and fashionistas – Anjelica Huston, Mick Jagger, Diane von Furstenberg; and strangest of all, met many of the key political figures of the time – Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Willy Brandt. It was one big, incestuous, family: 'I learned working for Andy that there isn't really the separation people think there is between society, the art world, the corporate elite, the European aristocracy. As you go higher up the social scale, they all kind of merge.'

Having been 'helicoptered up to the top of the mountain' by Warhol, he wasn't intimidated by the rareified atmosphere: 'I think because both of my parents were essentially salespeople, and Italian-Americans, I always seemed to get along with people; I had a knack of finding something to talk about. And Andy liked that because he was so awkward.' It's true that when Colacello starts talking in his captivating, languid New York bass, he just doesn't stop – 'I'm not good at short answers,' he explains, semi-apologetically.

Colacello was both insider and outsider, a journalist who was friends with the people he wrote about. When he started taking photographs, nobody minded: 'They just thought, oh that's Bob, and that's Interview, and Interview's like the school newspaper. It wasn't that serious.' He didn't take his role as photographer that seriously, either; his style was artless: 'I wanted them to feel like they were taken at a party. So for me that meant it's OK when somebody's hand is blocking somebody else. I would deliberately tilt the camera, just because at parties things get kind of skewed.'

Looking back at the pictures, now collected in a new book, Out, is bittersweet for Colacello. 'Part of me is like, 'Oh wasn't it great and wasn't I lucky and isn't it fortuitous that I did take some pictures along the way; but part of me also just focuses on how many people are gone.' Aids ripped into the scene around 1983. People who'd thought that cocaine was as mild as marijuana started to unravel. And Colacello's relationship with Warhol deteriorated. 'Like many people who collaborated with Andy, love turned to hate.

You can't hang around geniuses forever because they end up taking everything you've got. That's why they're the genius and you're not.' His photographs recall a time it would be impossible to recreate, because everyone's learned too much. Back then, he says, 'there was a kind of innocence to the decadence'.

Even so, he's still an inveterate party-goer. 'The funny thing about me is I'm kind of schizophrenic, because after four or five nights in a row of going out to parties, I just have to be alone. I hate people and feel like they're keeping me from what I really want to do, like write a fabulous novel, which I probably never will. But then the phone rings and it's somebody asking me to something that I just can't say no to.'